Tuesday, April 21, 2015
Good words from good mentors
Two of the people who have been my mentors in other aspects of life have recently started to write publicly, and it's remarkable to watch that unfold. Both of them bring to their writing the very qualities that have made them so important to me: depth, warmth, passion, and a rugged streak of individualism. It makes me so happy to read what they have been doing, and I learn something each time.
The first of these two is my dad, John Osler, Jr. He has been working with the jazz scene in Detroit for the last several years; he created the poster for last year's Detroit Jazz Festival, has done the same for this year's event, and put together a great book called Detroit Jazz. Not only his photography but his evocative writing appears regularly on the web site for the Dirty Dog Jazz Cafe, which is the Detroit area's epicenter for jazz of late. A few posts ago, he wrote this:
I was a shy student waiting for a great love to come along when Frank Sinatra’s hit song In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning came along, It sounded like my biography. Sinatra recorded David Mann and Bob Hilliard’s 1955 song at a time when it would have a considerably melancholy effect on my existence. Late at night, after studies, when I was feeling sorry for myself, I would listen to Frank sing ” you would be hers if only she would call…in the wee small hours of the morning that’s the time you miss her most of all”
Thursday night at the Dirty Dog Jazz Cafe, Cliff Monear’s Trio were playing requests. A couple asked for In the Wee Small Hours. It was played without words but it still had the same effect on me. I was swept up in the music completely, along with all the patrons who had had a lonely heart at some time in their life. Bassist Jeff Pedroz bowed the story with feeling while Cliff took the group into some more complex thoughts of unrequited love. All this time drummer Stephen Boegehold kept them safely “in the pocket”.
When Cliff took the request for this song, he said that he hadn’t heard the song for twenty years. How then could the trio give a seven minute rendition of the song? I can understand one guy interpreting a tune as he goes along but several guys. How the heck? I asked the band after the set. I got shrugs. When I talked to Cliff after his set about his trio, he looked like a child opening his Easter basket.
That's wonderful stuff.
The other "new writer" (at least in such a public way) is Craig Anderson. He always was wonderful at expressing himself (though sometimes non-verbally, by clubbing someone with a hockey stick, for example), but of late he has turned to writing regularly for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. It's striking, original work, too. Most recently, he wrote about his church building a rain garden, beginning with this:
The dreaming begets the imagining, and the imagining begets the reality. Dream it and, with patience, it will happen — and, in turn, others will be drawn to gather. And they will come. As will spring rains.
As an act of both faith and “green church” stewardship, the Church of the Holy Comforter — known fondly as HoCo to parishioners — has installed the first of what the church hopes to be a network of rain gardens situated strategically around the church grounds. The installation, at the corner of Monument Avenue and Staples Mill Road, took place during the third week of March — bracketing the first day of spring.
I love the way that both of these mentors of mine combine the personal, the spiritual/soulful, and the universal grittiness of life when they write. For them (in different ways), those were the things that informed the way they have always lived; and now, for both, there is a new way to share it. That is a great thing.
